Minotaur, Labyrinth, and Architecture

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Classical period/ ?????

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The classical period 600-323 BCE
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The three major Greek tragedians

• Aeschylus Agamemnon
• Sophocles Oedipus the King
• Euripides Medea

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AESCHYLUS524?-456 B.C.
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Epitaph of Aeschylus

• This tomb hides the dust of Aeschylus, an
  Athenian, Euphorions son, who died in
  wheat-bearing Gela his glorious valor the
  precinct of Marathon may proclaim, and the
  long-haired Medes, who knew it well.
• Aeschylus, Fragment 272

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Greek Text

• ??s????? ??f??????? ????a??? t?de ?e??e?µ??µa
  ?ataf??µe??? p???f????? G??a?????? d' e?d???µ??
  ?a?a?????? ??s?? ?? e?p???a? ßa???a?t?e?? ??d??
  ?p?st?µe???

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the creator of tragedy

• The earliest documents in the history of the
  Western theater are the seven plays of Aeschylus
  that have come down to us through the more than
  two thousand years since his death.
• ??? Oresteia,????????

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490s BCE

• When he produced his first play in the opening
  years of the fifth century B.C., the performance
  that we know as drama was still less than half a
  century old, still open to innovationand
  Aeschylus, in fact, made such significant
  contributions to its development that he has been
  called the creator of tragedy.

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Dionysia Festival

• After the defeat of the Persian invaders (480-479
  B.C.), as Athens with its fleets and empire moved
  toward supremacy in the Greek world, this spring
  festival became a splendid occasion.
• The Dionysia, as it was now called, lasted for
  four or five days, during which public business
  (except in emergencies) was suspended and
  prisoners were released on bail for the duration
  of the festival.

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an open-air theater

• In an open-air theater that could seat seventeen
  thousand spectators, tragic and comic poets
  competed for the prizes offered by the city.

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three tragedies and a satyr play

• Poets in each genre had been selected by the
  magistrates for the year.
• On each of three days of the festival, a tragic
  poet presented three tragedies and a satyr play
  (a burlesque on a mythic theme), and a comic poet
  produced one comedy.

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trilogy

• The three tragedies could deal with quite
  separate stories or, as in the case of
  Aeschyluss Oresteia, with the successive stages
  of one extended action.
• By the time this trilogy was produced (458 B.C.)
  the number of actors had been raised to three
  the spoken part of the performance became
  steadily more important.

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The Oresteia

• The first play, Agamemnon, was followed at its
  performance by two more plays, The Libation
  Bearers and The Eumenides, which carried on its
  story and theme to a conclusion.

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Death of Agamemnon
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Orestes killing Aigisthos
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an equilibrium (concerto)

• In the Oresteia an equilibrium between the two
  elements of the performance has been established.
  
• The actors, with their speeches, create the
  dramatic situation and its movement, the plot
• the chorus, while contributing to dramatic
  suspense and illusion, ranges free of the
  immediate situation in its odes, which extend and
  amplify the significance of the action.

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justice

• The theme of the trilogy is justice, and its
  story, like that of almost all Greek tragedies,
  is a legend that was already well known to the
  audience that saw the first performance of the
  play.

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Tribe ? polis

• The legend preserves the memory of an important
  historical process through which the Greeks had
  passed the transition from tribal institutions
  of justice to communal justice, from a tradition
  that demanded that a murdered persons next of
  kin avenge the death to a system requiring
  settlement of the private quarrel by a court of
  law (the typical institution of the city-state,
  which replaced the primitive tribe).

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Avenge

• When Agamemnon returns victorious from Troy, he
  is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her
  lover, Aegisthus, who is Agamemnons cousin.
• Clytemnestra kills her husband to avenge her
  daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrificed to
  the goddess Artemis when he had to choose between
  his daughters life and his ambition to conquer
  Troy.
• Aegisthus avenges the crime of a previous
  generation, the hideous murder of his brothers by
  Agamemnons father, Atreus.

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standards of the old system, justice

• The killing of Agamemnon is, by the standards of
  the old system, justice but it is the nature of
  this justice that the process can never be
  arrested, that one act of violence must give rise
  to another.

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This red-figure crater

• The Libation Bearers presents the revenge taken
  on Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Orestes,
  Agamemnon's son.
• This red-figure crater (c470 BCE) shows Orestes
  striking down Aegisthus as Clytemnestra tries to
  intervene with an axe.
• Electra stands at far right, urging him on.

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insoluble dilemma

• Agamemnons murder must be avenged too, as it is
  in the second play of the trilogy by Orestes has
  acted justly according to the code of tribal
  society based on blood relationship, but in doing
  so he has violated the most sacred blood
  relationship of all, the bond between mother and
  son.
• The old system of justice has produced an
  insoluble dilemma.

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The ending of the second play

• At the end of the second play they are only a
  vision in Orestes mindYou cant see them, he
  says to the chorus.
• I can they drive me on. I must move on.
• But in the final play we see them too they are
  the chorus, and they have pursued Orestes to the
  great shrine of Apollo at Delphi where he has
  come to seek refuge.

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The Furies

• At the end of The Libation Bearers , Orestes sees
  a vision of the Furies.
• They are serpent-haired female hunters, the
  avengers of blood.
• Agamemnon had a son to avenge him, but for
  Clytemnestra there was no one to exact payment.

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Furies/ Erinyes/ Eumendies

• female, chthonic deities of vengeance or
  supernatural personifications of the anger of the
  dead.
• They represent regeneration and the potency of
  creation, which both consumes and empowers.
• A formulaic oath in the Iliad (iii.278ff
  xix.260ff) invokes them as those who beneath the
  earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath.

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The Remorse of Orestes (1862) by William Frederic
Bouguereau (18251905)
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The task of the Furies

• This task is taken up by the Furies, who are the
  guardians of the ancient tribal sanctities
• they enforce the old dispensation when no earthly
  agent is at hand to do so.
• Female themselves, they assert the claim of the
  mother against the son who killed her to avenge
  his father.

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The trial

• The arguments employed in the trial may not
  strike us as compelling, and may appear
  disappointing as an answer to the problems of
  guilt and justice raised by the trilogy.

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The establishment of the court

• According to this argument, the fact of the
  courts establishment is more important than the
  particular judgment in Orestes case.
• This is the end of an old era and the beginning
  of a new.
• The court institutes a system of communal
  justice, which punishes impersonally and has at
  last replaced the inconclusive anarchy of
  individual revenge.

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Human institutions

• Besides, the trilogy not only is concerned with
  the history of human institutions but also makes
  a religious statement.
• The sequence of murderous acts and counter-acts
  over three generations, leading to an important
  advance in human understanding and civilization,
  can be seen as the working out of the will of
  Zeus.

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Athenian democracy

• The ending of the Eumenides, then, when the
  Furies call blessings down on Athens, gives a
  vision of a city ruled by law and living in
  harmony with its land and its gods.
• In this story of progress painfully won,
  Aeschylus offers Athenian democracy its charter
  myth just as it is entering the era of its
  greatest achievements and its greatest risks.

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THE CITY-STATES OF GREECE

• The geography of Greecea land of mountain
  barriers and scattered islandsencouraged this
  fragmentation.

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The expansion of Greece750-580 BCE

• Starting with colonies at Ischia and Cumae around
  the Bay of Naples in c. 750 BCE, the Greeks
  founded cities all around the Mediterranean, from
  the south of France to Naucratis in Egyptian
  Delta, to solve problems of over-population at
  home.

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Athens

• Athens was at this time a democracy, the first in
  Western history.
• It was a direct, not a representative, democracy,
  for the number of free citizens was small enough
  to permit the exercise of power by a meeting of
  the citizens as a body in assembly.

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The Athenian Acropolis
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Athena

• Athens is the symbol of freedom, art, and
  democracy in the conscience of the civilized
  world.
• The capital of Greece took its name from the
  goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom and
  knowledge.

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Resorted plan of the Agora in 400BCE
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Sparta

• Sparta, on the other hand, was rigidly
  conservative in government and policy.
• Because the individual citizen was reared and
  trained by the state for the states business,
  war, the Spartan land army was superior to any
  other in Greece, and the Spartans controlled, by
  direct rule or by alliance, a majority of the
  city-states of the Peloponnese.

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Persian War and Peloponnesian War

• These two cities, allies for the war of
  liberation against Persia, became enemies when
  the external danger was eliminated.
• The middle years of the fifth century were
  disturbed by indecisive hostilities between them
  and haunted by the probability of full-scale war
  to come.
• As the years went by, this war came to be
  accepted as inevitable by both sides, and in
  431 B.C, it began. It was to end in 404 B.C, with
  the total defeat of Athens.

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The Athenian Empire

• Before the beginning of this disastrous war,
  known as the Peloponnesian War, Athenian
  democracy provided its citizens with a cultural
  and political environment that was without
  precedent in the ancient world.
• The institutions of Athens encouraged the maximum
  development of the individuals capacities and at
  the same time inspired the maximum devotion to
  the interests of the community.

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Total Democracy Athenian Democracy in action

• The role of the assembly
• After 500 BCE the Assembly met at the Hill of the
  Pnyx, on which stood a plinth.

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Athena, maiden goddess of wisdom and the crafts,
was very aptly the special deity of Athens, a
city Aristotle later called the city hall of
wisdom.
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• ????(Classical Ideal)?????balance?order?

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Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Greece From
Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven Yale
UP, 1996.
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The Acropolis 447 BCE

• Since the assembly convened in the open air on a
  hillside above the agora, it required no building
  at all except for a speakers platform.
• In 447 B.C., however, at Pericles instigation, a
  great project began atop the Acropolis, the
  mesa-like promontory at the center of the city,
  which towered over the agora.

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Parthenon

• Most conspicuous of all were a mammoth gate
  building with columns straddling the broad
  entrance to the acropolis at its western end and
  a new Athena temple, the Parthenon, to house a
  towering image of the goddess.

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Expensive construction program

• These buildings alone cost easily more than the
  equivalent of a billion dollars in modern terms,
  a phenomenal sum for an ancient Greek city-state.
  
• The program was so expensive that the political
  enemies of Pericles railed at him for squandering
  public funds. The finances for the program
  apparently came in part form the tribute paid by
  the members of the Delian League.

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Parthenon

• Parthenon, the name of the new temple built for
  Athena on the Acropolis, meant the house of the
  virgin goddess.
• As the patron goddess of Athens, Athena had long
  had another sanctuary on the acropolis honoring
  her in her role as Athena Polias (guardian of
  the city).

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Optical illusion

• Since perfectly rectilinear architecture appears
  curved to the human eye, subtle curves and
  inclines were built into the Parthenon to produce
  an optical illusion of completely straight lines
  the columns were given a slight bulge in their
  middles, the corner columns were installed at a
  light incline and closer together, and the
  platform was made slightly convex.

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Next illustration

• Athenian youths carry offering jars in this
  relief from the Parthenons 524-foot-long frieze.
  Set in the entablature (see box) of the inner
  colonnade, which enclosed the core of the
  Parthenon, the frieze was obscured by the
  entablature of the outer colonnademaking it very
  difficult for visitors to view the carvings. The
  frieze may have depicted the Greater Panathenaea,
  a procession held every four years in which a new
  peplos (an ancient garment) was draped over the
  statue of Athena in the Old Temple of Athena. In
  the early 19th century, Lord Elgin removed 247
  feet of the frieze to the British Museum, where
  it remains on display to this day.

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???(Minotaur )

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  ???????,?????????????????

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Labyrinth

• ????????????????????????????,????????????????(Laby
  rinth)?
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  ?????????????????

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Theseus and Ariadne.

• ????,?????????????,???????????????(Theseus)???????
  ?,??????????
• ???????(Ariadne. )????,???????????,???????????????
  ????
• Ariadnes thread

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• Daedalus
• an Athenian architect, and the first inventor of
  images.

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Daedalus flying machines

• Minos ?Daedalus?????. . .
• ??????????????,Daedalus???Icarius????????????????
  ???,????????????????????????,????????

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Minos, king of Crete/ Daedalus

• the first ruler to control the Mediterranean Sea,
  which he ridded of pirates.
• He had with him a famed craftsman, Daedalus the
  Athenian, who was in exile from Athens because he
  had murdered his nephew Talos.
• Daedalus ?????????????????????!!

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Minoan Civilization
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Minos and Minotaur
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Theseus kills the Minotaur as Ariadne looks on
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Phaistos Palace
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Group Discussion

• 1 ??,?????????
• 2. ??????,??Orestes????,?????
• ???????????
• Apollo Shake out all ballots, friends. Count
  them fairly. Divide them with due care. Make no
  mistakes. Errors in judgment now can mean
  disaster. (AESCHYLUS, THE EUMENIDES 748-750)